Few outrages perpetrated by President Obamas Environmental Protection Agency can match its proposed rule titled Definition of Waters of the United States Under the Clean Water Act. It would remove navigable from American water law and take federal command of all waters of the United States, or WOTUS.

It redefines waters as nearly everything that could get wet, including most of the land in America.

Under WOTUS, every seasonal stream bed, puddle and ditch in the nation would be ruled by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers armed enforcers, bypassing Congress and sidestepping the U.S. Supreme Court in the process. Congress is helpless to stop it EPA-loving Democrats have a death grip on Senate bills and there arent the votes to override Obamas certain veto. The Supreme Court has twice struck down major pieces of the proposed rule, which the EPA blithely ignored and merely changed the words, hired scientific shills to patch over the flaws, and created this new

EPA has been buying support from Big Green groups on water issues since at least 1994, which came to light in an inspector general report of three cooperative agreements to the Natural Resources Defense Council totaling $3,260,467 for storm water education and market transformation of energy efficient products from 1994 to 2005.

The IG reported, We questioned $1,419,548 of reported outlays because [NRDC] did not maintain the necessary documentation to fully support the reported costs, as required by Federal regulations.

Big Green foundations have been lusting after WOTUS power since the late 1990s. Foundation Search shows 74 Clean Water Act grants totaling $5,261,449 since 2002, Barack Obamas last year on the Joyce Foundation board (1994-2002). Joyce gave $220,000 in CWA-related grants, $100,000 of it to NRDC in 2002. NRDC received $705,000 in 13 CWA-related grants from four foundations.

But dumbfounding as WOTUS is, thats not what makes this horror extraordinary. The fury ignited by WOTUS an entry in the Federal Register that could easily be ignored as just another technical bureaucratic maneuver is whats remarkable: Where the rule says water, a substantial public correctly hears land. They get it. They really get it.

WOTUS strikes many as the most vicious land grab since Lenin returned to St. Petersburg. The EPAs intent, unlike its usual smokescreen of lies, is transparent. And that annoys people. It annoys them very, very much. Heres why I say that:

In June, when Bob Stallman testified before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee as president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, it was no surprise that he told them, The bottom line is that the expansion of the waters regulated under the Clean Water Act has enormous implications for small business entities that the agencies have not considered, much less explained. EPA is deliberately misleading the regulated community.

He was politely saying he was perfectly aware that WOTUS would give federal regulators unlimited power to dictate how farmers farm, and he didnt trust EPAs promise to exempt farmers irrigation ditches. Farmers can smell EPA land-grab lies even under a heap of WOTUS manure.

Stallman told me at the time, Ive been farming for decades and I can tell you that ditches are meant to carry water. Ditches will be regulated under this rule!

I discovered that the American Farm Bureau was taking steps to protect its 6 million member families in an astonishingly well-designed website called Ditch the Rule. Its a Farm Bureau effort with all the social media clickables, hashtags and tweet buttons, including Ditches & puddles are not navigable.#DitchTheRule and Congress, not federal agencies, makes the laws.#WOTUS, among others. (Full disclosure: I tweeted them all and got a lot of retweets.)

The Farm Bureau is a trade association obligated to guard farmer interests, so the real surprise came in an email from an unrelated nonprofit that jumped in with a Ditch the Rule campaign of its own just because it was the right thing to do: the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, which usually deals with climate change, energy and poverty issues.

I asked CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker about it. We almost didnt pick it up because it seemed off-target for our supporters, but with farmers taking on this huge WOTUS problem to save themselves, we just couldnt stand by and do nothing.

Astonishingly, we only started our Ditch the Rule campaign two weeks ago and last week our Facebook page got over a million hits. Our supporters get it. WOTUS has hit a nerve in America, a really big nerve.

I asked Mace Thornton, the Farm Bureaus communications executive director, whether he was aware that CFACT had joined the fray. He wasnt, but welcomed the help. Weve been encouraging our members to share their individual stories through social media and theyve responded overwhelmingly. Its good to know our reach is extending far beyond our organization. We know our work has only begun.

The EPA is sweating. Theres a page on the EPA website trying lamely to discredit Farm Bureau facts. EPA should sweat. I sense an incipient mass movement targeting WOTUS. It is not inconceivable that fed-up citizens could appear on farms across the nation in peaceful protests to face down EPA enforcers and say, Ditch the Rule.

Approximately two-thirds of Ecuador’s population voted ‘yes’ this Autumn, in a historic, national referendum – a result that reflects the vast majority’s hopeful expectation of political change. By an overwhelming margin, the Ecuadorians backed their president, Rafael Correa, in voting for a new progressive constitution – the first in the world to grant Nature the same inalienable rights as human beings.

“I think a lot of eyes will be on Ecuador,” said Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund – the law firm that worked with the members of Ecuador’s Assembly to draft the legal framework. “With this vote, they are leading the way for countries around the world to fundamentally change how we protect Nature.”

---------------

Dr Mario Melo, a lawyer specialising in Environmental Law and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama, explained that the new constitution redefines people’s relationship with Nature. It is not an object to be appropriated and exploited but rather a rights-bearing entity, that should be treated with parity under the law.

“In this sense, the constitution reflects the traditions of the indigenous peoples living in Ecuador, who see Nature as a mother and call her by her proper name, Pachamama,” Dr Mario Melo said.

This new bill for Nature’s ‘right to exist’ offers an alternative paradigm. It clearly acknowledges that all life on Earth is interconnected. It must be protected and respected for the sake of all species – beliefs which have long been obvious to Ecuador’s indigenous peoples.

The constitution provides explicit legal protection for the environment. Says one section: ‘Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has a right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions and its processes in evolution.’

------------------

Although the government is ultimately responsible for upholding the new laws, in Ecuador, every individual, organisation or community now has the power to represent Nature in the courts and halt any damaging activities.

--------------------

President Correa has already proposed a ban on drilling in the Yasuni National Park. The Ecuadorian government has appealed to the international community to find innovative ways to recompense their country for the estimated 4.6 billion dollars income which will be lost. “We offer to forsake oil revenue for the sake of humanity,” Rafael Correa said, “but we need the international community to share the responsibility, by providing... compensation in recognition of the environmental benefits we will generate for the entire planet.”

The new constitution of 444 articles has been created democratically. It in-corporates proposals put together by the 70,000 citizens, who were present at the Assembly in Montecristi. Along with the rights for Nature, it also contains social reforms, aimed at improving the quality of life for the 38 per cent of Ecuadorians who live below the poverty line.

New provisions guarantee collective rights to water and food, free education for all, increased spending on health, the availability of low-interest micro-loans, building materials for first-time home owners and free seeds for growing crops.

Ecuador’s extension of legal rights for Nature may also represent a wider shift in how humans view their place in the world. The Legal Defence Fund has been fielding calls on the subject from Italy Australia, South Africa and Nepal – also in the throes of its first constitution.

-------------------

Some religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama, have recently declared that caring for Nature is a spiritual duty, while the Catholic Church has incorporated: 'thou shalt not pollute the environment' into its revised list of Seven Deadly Sins.

“We are still on time for our laws to recognise the right of a river to flow and to prohibit actions that will destabilise the Earth’s climate...” said Mr Acosta. “It is time to stop the mad commodification of Nature, as it was in previous years, time to prohibit the buying and selling of human beings.”

No one could put this in fiction. It's too fantastic.

]]>9594Thu, 18 Dec 2008 04:12:33 +0000Vermont first state to ban frackinghttp://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13630-vermont-first-state-to-ban-fracking/Just say NO to fracking.
]]>13630Fri, 18 May 2012 08:12:54 +0000Doubt cast on CO2 as cause of "global warming"....http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13631-doubt-cast-on-co2-as-cause-of-global-warming/Please see article in the Manchester Guardian. It appears that the effect of water vapor has been underestimated by climate scientists.

To make matters worse, the legislators are waking up to this [manufacturer engine] power race, and there's every chance they will soon start taxing horsepower in the same way they do g/km CO2. It's already started in Italy. On January 1 a new annual tax was introduced of €20 (£17) for each additional kilowatt of power over 185kW(248bhp). This means that anyone buying one of these 720bhp (560kW) Ferrari 599 replacements will have to be prepared to shell out an additional €7500, making the Italian equivalent of our road fund license cost €9000. That makes our £1000 first-year and subsequent £460 annual fees look laughably cheap in comparison. Own one of these 599 successors for three years in the UK and you'll pay £1920 in road tax, whereas our Italian friend need to stump up around £22,500!

The editor goes on to assure the reader that the it isn't just supercar owners that are getting hit this way, that even a BMW M5 can be taxed prohibitively:

[italians] will now have to find around £15,000 in road tax over those first three years, whereas a UK owner would stump up £1660. As you can imagine, sales of new evo-type cars in Italy have fallen off a cliff since this tax was announced, with upmarket dealerships closing on an almost daily basis of a result.

The piece, written by the magazine's founder, suggests we curtail the horsepower wars -- not put governments and the anti-car/anti-joy crowd in their place or demand better roads and higher driving standards as cars get more and more capable, but that we live with less powerful cars, more humble dreams, far less joy and fulfillment.

The cherry on the cake:

The only exception to this 500bhp rule [i'm proposing] should be the so-called hypercars. Cars such as Veyrons, Paganis, Koenigseggs and this year's Enzo replacement must continue to puch the boundaries of what's possible.

Why do we need horsepower boundaries pushed in a world whose cars are forever limited to 500bhp? Most hypercar projects loose a ton of money, money that's only recovered when the tech pioneered on these projects trickles down to mass produced models. How much tech could trickle down to the VW Bug from the 1200hp variant of the Veyron?

(As of 2012, all cars sold in the US have to have a black box. Velocity, acceleration, pitch, roll, yaw, braking force, etc., will be accessed to analyze accidents. The UK is looking to adjust insurance rates every three months based on this telemetry, adding the amount of miles driven, what time of day the car is used, which roads are used, etc.)

In 2005, Mike and Chantell Sackett bought a piece of land in Idaho, and set about building a modest home on their $23,000 lot. The dreadful flaming eye of the Environmental Protection Agency soon turned upon them, and they were told their little half-acre parcel of land, which is located about five hundred feet away from a lake, was a federally protected wetland.

If you’re familiar with the EPA, you can guess what happened next. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported in April 2011:

The Sacketts say they were stunned. The owners of an excavation company, they had secured all the necessary local permits. And Chantell Sackett says that before work began, she drove two hours to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to consult with an Army Corps of Engineers official. She says the official told her orally, though not in writing, that she didn’t need a federal permit. “We did all the right things,” she says.

The EPA issued an order requiring the Sacketts to put the land back the way it was, removing the piles of fill material and replanting the vegetation they had cleared away. The property was to be fenced off and the Sacketts would be required to submit annual reports about its condition to the EPA. The agency threatened to fine them up to $32,500 a day until they complied.

]]>13349Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:32:36 +0000Hey there asthma sufferers, get a look at this!http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13347-hey-there-asthma-sufferers-get-a-look-at-this/Hello you wheezers and geezers. Guess what Uncle Barak has in store for you!

U.S. District Court judges aren't known for using inflammatory language in deciding the weighty issues that come before them on the federal bench. So it was remarkable to read the scorching indictment of a federal environmental agency and two of its scientists last week by Judge Oliver W. Wanger. (See also Washington Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold's detailed look at the case on Page 30. [next post]) The case concerns how the government should manage California water supplies and at the same time seek to preserve the delta smelt, an allegedly endangered species of minnow-like fish.

Big Green environmentalists claim the delta smelt is threatened with extinction by diversion of water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers to supply farms in California's Central Valley and cities in Southern California. Those diversions are handled by the Central Valley Project, a Depression-era federal water project designed to move water from California's northern area to its arid southern region. The issue before Wanger was where Department of Interior officials should set boundaries between the fresher water of the rivers the fish prefer and the saltier waters from the San Francisco Bay. The 2-inch-long fish mainly breeds in marshy estuary areas where the fresh and salt water mix.

By diverting more fresh water for the delta smelt, federal officials reduce the amount available for people on farms and in cities. California's Central Valley was long among the nation's richest agricultural areas, producing fruits and vegetables shipped to grocery shelves across the country. Increased water diversion under President Obama and Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar, however, has wreaked Depression-like economic havoc on the region, costing thousands of jobs, increasing food prices nationwide, and destroying a way of life for many California farm families. Unemployment in some areas of the valley has reached 40 percent.

Wanger was angered by testimony from the two scientists, Frederick V. Feyrer and Jennifer M. Norris, that he said was "false," "contradictory" and "misleading." He accused the Interior Department of "bad faith" in providing the two scientists as experts, and claimed their testimony was "an attempt to mislead and to deceive the court into accepting not only what is not the best science, it's not science." An Interior Department spokesman defended Norris and Feyrer, telling the New York Times that "we stand behind the consistent and thorough findings by our scientists on these matters and their dedicated use of the best available science."

Wanger and the Interior Department scientists cannot both be right. The judge's assessment of their testimony and his conclusion about the agency's conduct in the case raise profoundly serious questions about the integrity and honesty of all the federal officials involved in the delta smelt case. And if the judge is correct in that case, taxpayers should be wondering whether other government scientists have given impeachable testimony on behalf of questionable federal environmental policies.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who represents a large portion of the Central Valley, is right to call for a congressional investigation "into the actions of Secretary Salazar and others at Interior in relation to California water policy. The recent U.S. District Court ruling, citing illegal actions and abuse of power on the part of Interior, must be addressed."

President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

His base won't be happy ... but even he is smart enough to realize that he can't win by catering to his base.

They are not the first to move to rural Maine from a more heavily populated part of the East Coast — Pennsylvania in their case — with dreams of homesteading in the woods. Nor are they the first to do so while in possession of a well-thumbed copy of “The Good Life,” the 1954 book by former Brooksville residents Helen and Scott Nearing that has served as a manual for simple, sustainable living for so many...

But there aren’t many who do so while living inside former marine shipping containers. Seip and Sansosti, both in their late 20s, have two, each about 20 feet long and eight feet wide and high, that they have modified into living units, complete with electricity and running water. They have spent much of the past year modifying the containers, ...

Note the ideological commitment to a "minimalist" life style "off the grid" as a social message for some kind of utopian existence while relying extensively on advanced manufactured technology used in utterly impractical and inefficient ways -- like solar panels barely adequate for a 75 watt light bulb (when the sun is out) and peddling a stationary bicycle the equivalent of 25 miles to generate enough electricity to power a light bulb for a few hours. The supposed remote woods they "homesteaded" are on the suburban outskirts within the city of Ellsworth in southern Maine.

]]>13159Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:44:45 +0000Obama administration targeting Maine for Federal control - "I invited myself":http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13289-obama-administration-targeting-maine-for-federal-control-i-invited-myself/"Ownership and private property were the beginning of the end in this country" -- Roxanne Quimby.

Obama's Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar and National Park Service Directory Jon Jarvis "visited" Maine this month to promote Federal control by the National Park Service over a large portion of the state -- from 70,000 to millions of acres of private property. They are trying to get it started through a "gift" of land from their cohort Roxanne Quimby, a wealthy wilderness radical who has been buying up land to put it, and a lot more of Maine, under Federal control.

The state legislature recently passed a resolution opposing the agenda, pointedly addressing it directly at Obama and Salazar telling them to butt out. The governor and Maine's two US Senators also oppose it. The Obama administration thumbed its nose at the state and came anyway. Salazar said "I invited myself". This kind of Federal arrogance ought to make anyone sit up and take notice, but it's nothing compared to what they do when they get the control they want.

Last year, more than 600,000 nature lovers held memberships in the National Parks Conservation Association (2010 revenue, $43.2 million), with its noble slogan, "protecting our national parks for future generations." The group is lobbying for 130 more parks immediately, and its website extols magnificent parks and historic sites that "embody the American spirit" and deplores "the many dangers that threaten to destroy them forever."

But the National Park Service, which actually administers the places NPCA touts, is a ruthless, insatiable land-grabbing bureaucracy that has brutally dispossessed thousands of homeowners nationwide, ruining lives to expand its empire with cold-blooded efficiency.

Everybody loves "America's best idea," as PBS filmmaker Ken Burns calls our national parks -- from Acacia to Yosemite, and from Yellowstone to the Everglades. But even PBS couldn't stomach the National Park Service's atrocity in Ohio's rural Cuyahoga Valley. In the 1970s, they came with sweet promises that the government would take only a modest recreation area. At first, that meant the loss of 30 homes. Then 200, then 600, and finally an undisclosed master plan to depopulate a 51-square-mile swath of the valley's farms and towns and homes.

In 1983, "PBS Frontline with Jessica Savitch" ran an expose titled, "For the Good of All," tracing the Cuyahogans' hopeless struggle to keep their homes and heritage. Many viewers never forgave the parks service, but the National Parks Conservation Association cheered it on.

Today, the association glorifies Cuyahoga Valley National Park -- trails for the hike and bike bunch and sanitized artisan farmers who pretend to be like those who once actually lived there.

Last week, the National Park Service took its Cuyahoga-like show to Millinocket, Maine's high school auditorium, where park service Director Jon Jarvis and his boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, tried to sweet-talk 300 locals into a proposed 70,000-acre North Woods National Park that NPCA wants to create.

Roxanne Quimby, multimillionaire founder of Burt's Bees products, proposed giving part of her local landholdings to the United States for a national park. The state legislature, the governor and both of Maine's U.S. senators had already rejected the idea because it would certainly expand and consume the heart of Maine's timberlands.

Mainers also recalled that Destry Jarvis, Jon's brother, had been a high-ranking NPCA official who created a monstrous eight-volume, Rockefeller-funded, national park expansion plan in 1988. Destry's wish list included five huge national parks in Maine.

Salazar denied accusations that it would expand, promising that Mainers would control the park's size. Maine's federal delegation and legislators would not allow it to be otherwise, he said. "We," he reminded the audience, "are a nation of laws."

State Sen. Doug Thomas, who represents the area, suspected that the NPCA and Quimby were actually behind this visit, and asked Salazar who invited him to Maine.

"I invited myself," Salazar said. "Nobody invited me."

If all this makes the National Parks Conservation Association sound like a private lobbyist for the National Park Service, that's because it is. And that's what it was meant to be. It was created in 1919 as the National Parks Association by Stephen Mather, borax millionaire and first director of the National Park Service.

Mather the bureaucrat was impatient with rules. And so Mather the industrialist circumvented them by founding NPCA's predecessor organization, for the explicit purpose of promoting the National Park Service in ways the agency could not do legally.

With Salazar appearing "uninvited" in places that interest the National Parks Conservation Association, it's a good bet that somebody is dusting off Destry's list and checking it for easy targets.

Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

They're doing more than dusting off old lists.

Multi-millionaire Roxanne Quimby is a far leftist and wilderness fanatic affiliated with the radical Massachusetts organization 'RESTORE: The North Woods'. She has been on its board of directors, leaving, as she acknowledged, only to try to moderate her 'image' in Maine while still supporting the organization and its goals.

Restore's purpose is to pressure for government-imposed wilderness "ecosystem restoration" across the northeast, eliminating industry and taking over millions of acres of land, forcing people to live in "balance with nature", including "population control".

Restore has been pushing for a 3.2 million acre Federal park in Maine for decades. The target area came from the NPCA National Park System Plan concocted in Washington DC -- under the direction of the brother of the current National Park Service Director -- in the 1980s in collaboration with the National Park Service itself and other big park pressure groups, including the Wilderness Society, which they credit for the idea of the current target in the Maine woods. Restore split off from the Wilderness Society in the early 1990s to focus on this campaign.

Restore is run by the former Northeast Regional Director of the Wilderness Society and a sidekick from Maine, also from the Wilderness Society. It is backed by wealthy Hollywood celebrities and big-name national viro activists. One of them is former Audubon VP and current head of the Endangered Species Coalition in Washington DC Brock Evans. Evans is notorious for his "take it all" speech exhorting sympathetic activists at an environmentalist leadership conference to go after Federal control of 26 millions acres of mostly private property extending from the coast of Maine, across northern New Hampshire and Vermont to the western side of the Adirondacks in New York. Kellet also said that most of that 26 million acres will be in Federal ownership.

Quimby has boasted for decades that she is buying up as much land as she can in order to turn it over to the National Park Service as a "gift" to bring in Federal control. She has openly stated that the current 70,000 acres is intended as a "seed" and a "down payment" for millions of acres more, and is trying to establish a foothold by the National Park Service from which she intends for it to expand its control. She is an insider in the National Park lobby who knows Salazar personally. Obama appointed her to the Federally-created National Park Foundation to promote the National Park Service.

Quimby is opposed to private property rights on principle. She told Yankee Magazine three years ago:

To me, ownership and private property were the beginning of the end in this country. Once the Europeans came in, drawing lines and dividing things up, things started getting exploited and overconsumed. But a park takes away the whole issue of ownership. It's off the table; we all own it and we all share it. It's so democratic.

Here is a link to the 1980s PBS Frontlines documentary on the National Park Service For the Good of All referred to in the article.

What else would you expect from Obama? They want to celebrate the centennial of a ruthless Federal agency, the National Park Service, in 2016 by taking over huge regions of private property in a state that has told them to get lost.

How do you get all this from bees wax? Through a turkey coop:

Quimby is a 60s radical counter-culture type who was born in Cambridge MA and attended a California arts 'college' in the early 1970s. She traveled across the country in a jalopy to Maine, where she lived in deliberate poverty in the woods as a 'back-to-the-lander'. She hooked up with her partner Burt who was eking out a living by collecting and selling bees wax and living in a turkey coop, then expanded the business through a scam selling the bees wax in small packages at high prices to people who rubbed it on their bodies as part of the "natural" fad. She turned this into the Burt's Bees personal care products company and made millions, moving it out of Maine to avoid the high taxes. She sold her stake in her "Green" company for nearly $300 million and has been using the money to buy up private property in order to destroy private property rights ever since -- while living in mansions herself and hobnobbing with Washington insiders. Her former partner Burt got only about $4 million -- and is reportedly still living in a turkey coop.

You couldn't make these things up and if you could it would be too unbelievable for fiction. These people are crazy, but they have a lot of money and a lot of power.

]]>13289Fri, 26 Aug 2011 05:29:46 +0000Lobbyists on the take, crying babies, and arbitrary powerhttp://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13245-lobbyists-on-the-take-crying-babies-and-arbitrary-power/From the Washington Examiner: how lobbyists on the take are demagoguing with crying babies to give arbitrary powers to bureaucracy without acknowledging what they want.

Is the American Lung Association EPA's chief lobbyist?

By: Ron Arnold | 08/04/11 8:05 PM

If you've watched TV this past week, you've probably seen "the Red Carriage television advertisement" being run over and over and over.

The sound track consists of a pitiful asthmatic infant wheezing and coughing alarmingly enough to jolt any parent into emergency mode. But what you see is only a side view of the red baby buggy in one place after another, never who or what's in it.

The quick images jump from the red baby buggy beside the Washington Monument, to the red baby buggy outside a congressional building, to the red baby buggy in the halls of Congress, and finally the red baby buggy on the Capitol steps, the invisible baby coughing and wheezing and crying all the way.

Last scene: As the American flag waves before the shining Capitol dome, a mommy's voice instructs us, "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks. Log on to LungUSA.org and tell Washington: Don't weaken the Clean Air Act."

The press release accompanying the ad said the American Lung Association produced it to "thwart congressional attacks on the Clean Air Act." ALA's website says, "We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health."

You have to concede that this ad is a masterpiece of lobbying. It made me want to grab that poor baby and rush to the nearest medical help. Too bad it's nothing but cunning propaganda.

This "Crusade against Congress" has nothing to do with childhood asthma. It has everything to do with the Environmental Protection Agency's defiant end-run around Congress to expand the Clean Air Act with unauthorized CO2 regulations that the Senate rejected in 2008 by killing the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill.

That defeat prompted President Obama to tell the nation that if he couldn't impose his climate change agenda legislatively, he'd do it administratively, with regulations and directives.

In response, many in Congress are fed up with the EPA's rogue agency behavior, and have proposed defunding its unauthorized regulations. One congressman has even proposed abolishing the EPA altogether.

So the Red Carriage ad is not about protecting public health. It's about protecting EPA's power. And it's about the American Lung Association acting like EPA's chief lobbyist.

The EPA website also shows the agency paid $20.4 million taxpayer dollars to 61 American Lung Association affiliates. That looks like collusion and conflict of interest to me.

Not that ALA needs the money. The group's Internal Revenue Service Form 990 shows that 2010 revenue was $47.7 million, and only $796,150 of that came from government grants. (Where's that $7.7 million?) ALA's president and chief executive officer, Charles D. Connor, received compensation in excess of $370,000.

These well-off people manipulate our emotions to bolster crumbling confidence in an agency running on ideology rather than fact. It's ironic that the Red Carriage ad's mommy voice tells us that "Congress can't ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks."

Scientists disagree. Two Australian immunologists, Kendle M. Maslowski and Charles R. Mackay, wrote early this year in the journal Nature Immunology:

"The hygiene hypothesis is now the prevailing explanation for the increase in asthma and atopic disorders in Western countries. It suggests that excess cleanliness in the environment has led to a decrease in the number of infectious stimuli needed for proper development of the immune system."

Climate change is far less serious than ‘alarmists’ predict, an eminent NASA scientist has said.

Dr Roy Spencer, who works on the space agency’s temperature-monitoring satellites, claimed they showed ‘a huge discrepancy’ between the real levels of heating and forecasts by the United Nations and other groups.

After looking at the levels of radiation in the atmosphere over the past ten years, he believes the Earth releases a lot more heat into space than previously thought. This means carbon dioxide emissions do not trap as much heat or force temperatures up as much as global warming bodies fear.

Americans arriving in London often remark that the headlines look like news from another planet, not another country.

They see alien phrases such as "fuel poverty," which appeared in an early-July Daily Mirror op-ed about Britain's costly green energy policy:

"As energy prices go through the roof, shocking figures reveal one in four families has been plunged into fuel poverty. Consumer Focus warns as many as 6 million could be forced to choose between a hot meal or heating their homes this winter."

Well, the Mirror is a popular tabloid. How about something more focused, like Totally Money News? The TMN writer said:

"The fact is that we can now find the fuel poor amongst all walks of life and in all types of households. Start to factor in housing costs such as mortgage and rental payments and we are left with the shocking image of a third of all British households living in fuel poverty. The sad truth is that consumers are paying a heavy price for this country's disjointed, incoherent and unaffordable energy policy."

Such horrifying stories and strange expressions abound in the London press because the United Kingdom is already far into the clean green energy economy that President Obama keeps promising America. So Londoners know all about "spinning reserve."

What's that? The Sunday Telegraph's Christopher Booker explained that if Britain is to spend [$163 billion] on building thousands of wind turbines, "it will require an additional [$16.3 billion] for 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to be kept running on 'spinning reserve,' 24 hours a day," as backup for when the wind drops and the windmills produce no power.

Booker concluded: "Gas-fired power stations running on 'spinning reserve' chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency -- thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves. I'm afraid we are in the hands of very dangerous children, upon whose deranged wishful thinking a large part of our country's future depends."

The United States seems to be in similar hands.

A London Times commentator indulged in more wistful thinking: "We could have started the shale gas revolution here, as we started the fossil fuel revolution itself. We could still start the underground-coal gasification revolution here. We could push thorium reactors. But starting a business in Britain's regulated economy and planning system is like swimming in treacle [molasses]."

When the U.S. actually makes "the glorious transition" to a clean energy economy, we may find ourselves repeating the words spoken two weeks ago by Hugh Mackay, Lord Reay, in the Parliamentary Business section of the national website:

"The Climate Change Act should be repealed, its panoply of carbon budgets abandoned, all the agencies such as the climate change committee which drips its advice into the Government's ear sent packing, and a chance given to our economy to resurrect itself. Otherwise we have a grim and, very likely, a dim future."

The Local, an English-language German paper, tersely noted at midmonth, "The German government wants to encourage the construction of new coal and gas power plants with millions of euros from a fund for promoting clean energy and combating climate change."

The London Times' Matt Ridley nailed it: "The future belongs to countries that can get their electricity, heat and fuel supplied as cheaply and reliably as possible. That is the priority, not the carbon fetish."

Brits may one day visit America, feel like they landed on the dark side of Planet Obama, and instead of "strange," they'll mutter, "dumb."

Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

The House on Wednesday afternoon approved an amendment to the 2012 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that will allow new animals to be classified as endangered.

The spending bill as proposed by Republicans would only have allowed species to be delisted, but would not have allowed new species to be added. Republicans justified the language by saying giving the government funds to fully operate the Endangered Species Act (ESA) would only lead to lawsuits from groups to have species listed, which in turn can chew up the entire budget.

But Republicans were somewhat split on the issue. The amendment to allow new species listings, from Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), was approved in a 224-202 vote in which 37 Republicans voted for it — allowing it to pass — while 200 Republicans voted against it...

...Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) was one Republican who said funding the ESA would only lead to lawsuits draining that budget and urged a "no" vote on the Dicks language.

"This amendment proposes to do away with funding caps altogether and gives the green light to those who have made a living suing the Fish and Wildlife Service," Simpson said. "As a result, the litigants will act, the courts will all act, and the Fish and Wildlife Service's entire operating budget will be at risk of being raided in order to fund court-ordered mandates to list species and designate critical habitat."

Rep. Steven Pearce (R-NM) agreed and noted that one group last year filed 1,000 petitions to list a new species. "They know that their lawyers get reimbursed from the federal government every time they bring suit, and so they're happy to bring these actions, which are destroying jobs in the West," Pearce said...

Maine's two largest Indian tribes are raising concerns about a large wind power project proposed for eastern Maine, saying it may interfere with sacred religious ceremonies dating back 10,000 years.

In a letter to the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, an official with the Passamaquoddy Tribe says the Bowers Mountain Wind Project is too close to cultural and spiritual sites on its land. Nearby wind turbines, says Donald Soctomah, the tribe's historic preservation officer, would have a harmful effect on cultural activities.

Because the tribes are considered sovereign nations under state and federal law, their concerns add a new dimension to the ongoing debate over wind power in Maine.

The project has drawn opposition from sporting-camp owners and fishing guides ... across the Downeast Lakes watershed. They worry that the site of turbine blades and navigation lights will ruin the remote, wild feel of the region and offend visiting fishermen and other guests.

This is preposterous. Indian tribes, despite wishful thinking, are not "sovereign nations" and have no right to prohibit civilization "visible" from their nature mysticism. It's not supposed to matter that taxpayers are subsidizing an expensive and impractical form of energy embraced by viros, but now we are told that ancient Indian mysticism is to dictate the outcome. This whole farce is enough to make your ears wilt, but it is dangerously being imposed on us with the force of law and lawyers' manipulations tying people up in knots.

A compact fluorescent light (CFL) on the ceiling burst and started a fire in a home in Hornell, N.Y. December 23, 2010. "Those are the lights everybody's been telling us to use," said Joe Gerych, Steuben County Fire Inspector. "It blew up like a bomb. It spattered all over." Fire Chief Mike Robbins said the blaze destroyed the room where the fire started and everything in it, and the rest of the house suffered smoke and water damage.

"Tom and Nancy Heim were watching TV recently, when Tom decided to turn on the floor lamp next to his recliner chair. 'I heard this loud pop...I saw what I thought was smoke, coming out of the top of the floor lamp,' says Tom. Nancy suddenly found glass in her lap. She says, 'I did not see it. I just heard it, and I noticed I had glass on me.'"

On February 23, 2011, TV NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee covered "a newly-released investigators' report that blames a February 12 fatal fire in Gallatin on one of those CFL bulbs." Ben Rose, an attorney for the rehabilitative facility in which Douglas Johnson, 45, perished, said, "This result is consistent with our own private investigation. ...We have heard reports of similar fires being initiated by CFLs across the country."

]]>13027Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:33:35 +0000Obama/viros suppressing mininghttp://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/10735-obamaviros-suppressing-mining/An an example of what difference who is in the White House makes for how the government is run under existing law, Obama viro appointees are cracking down on mining, attempting to reverse previous policies for mining rights under the law. In parallel, the standard strategy is for their cronies in the viro pressure groups to embark on friendly lawsuits nominally "against" the government to help them along in further expanding their powers.

Here are some excerpts from an article in the July 24, 2009 Public Lands News, a viro publication in Washington DC, on how viros are expanding powers to restrict land use outside a National Park (the Grand Canyon) because it is "adjacent" to the park -- all 1 million acres. This agenda has been pursued for many years. They keep pushing, year after year, knowing that it only takes one win to lock in what they want forever. National Parks are like cancers -- they matastasize to encompass what is around them, killing all private activity in sight (the so-called "viewshed") and beyond as the viros use "protection" of the "sacred" National Park as an excuse to expand.

In this case the government (BLM) already controls the surrounding land so the intervention is through the Interior Dept. issuing new edicts directly to block mining claims on behalf of the Anti-Industrial Revolution. Miners are supposed to be able to claim mining rights to discoveries under the 1862 Mining Act (analogous to the Homestead Act), which the viros have long been trying to destroy. Meanwhile the viros use bureaucratic edicts to "withdraw" land they want "preserved" as "wilderness" in order to blunt rights under the Mining law. Interpretation of laws is through regulations written by the agencies.

This case also illustrates how "compromises" made with viros never last -- they always take as much as they can get and come back for the rest later, demanding that they were entitled to all of it from the beginning.

In this case, McCain (R-AZ) is playing a prominent role, primarily against the viros, because he is an Arizona Senator.

Interior blocks new uranium claims near Grand Canyon

The Interior Department posted a “segregation” notice July 21 that bars the

filing of new uranium mining claims on almost one million acres of public land near

Grand Canyon National Park...

The department’s proposed withdrawal would approximate a June 25, 2008, demand

of the House Natural Resources Committee for an emergency withdrawal of the one

million acres. The Bush administration on Dec. 5, 2008, refused to carry out the

Who is Gordon Moore and what does he have against copper? He's the multibillionaire co-founder of computer chip giant Intel, and he has pledged $2.7 million against a planned mine in the largest known ore body of copper on the planet, Alaska's Pebble Mine -- even though Intel uses tons of copper.

As chairman of his private foundation, Moore gave $1.1 million to the Alaska Conservation Foundation for "Pebble mine campaign coordination;" $1 million to the Renewable Resources Coalition for "Pebble mine education and outreach"; and $624,000 to the Nature Conservancy's Alaska office for "Pebble mine science and risk assessment."

Moore gave the money and marching orders at the same time in 2008. The mine developers, Pebble Limited Partnership, hadn't released their proposal at that time and still haven't released their detailed plan to build and operate the most environmentally sensitive mine in history, careful of the vast salmon runs from Bristol Bay, cognizant of earthquake fault lines, wildlife habitat, native village subsistence hunting, the whole book.

It's not just Moore. The war against Pebble is already one of the largest and most expensive Big Green campaigns ever -- Natural Resources Defense Council ($96.9 million revenue) runs a circuslike Stop the Pebble Mine crusade, replete with jeremiads of salmon doom, aging actor Robert Redford demanding that development partners Anglo American and Rio Tinto withdraw from the project, and gloats that they already chased away Mitsubishi.

Dozens of Big Green groups operate anti-Pebble fights. Environmental Defense Fund ($151 million in assets) runs a petition drive, the National Wildlife Federation ($98.4 million annual revenue) enlists native groups and fishermen, and so on into a coalition of hundreds.

They're even recruiting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to wield an obscure and inappropriate section of the Clean Water Act as brute force to kill the mine project.

It shows, if nothing else, that environmentalism is no longer a movement. Counting its foundation funders, it's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's a strange, alien industry that absolutely opposes any development anywhere.

Hard to believe, but Big Green Inc. is afflicted with a peculiar schizophrenia that shows most clearly in President Obama's clean energy economy campaign. "Clean energy economy" sounds so promising -- wind farms, solar panels, electric cars, biofuels, wonderful products -- all set in a pristine Eden, an untouchable paradise like Bristol Bay.

They want all those wonderful products, but they don't want anybody developing anything to get the stuff necessary to make them. Like mental patients or mystics, from their moral high throne, true believers can't perceive their own contradictions, can't grasp the biblical "more bricks, no straw" analogy.

The Obama administration, with all its agencies, is the definitive true believer, stopping all development everywhere.

The result? Goods production is vanishing in America. There is no recovery from this recession because Washington is killing it. Industry isn't hiring because regulators won't let developers develop. With no development, there's nothing to work on and so no jobs.

I asked Pebble Limited Partnership Chief Executive Officer John Shively what he thought of this outsize opposition. "To try stopping this project before we've even announced what it will be is to deny us the due process people in this country are entitled to."

True, but why is the opposition to the Pebble Mine so ferocious, so hugely funded, so desperate? What's so terrifying about this mine that other mines haven't aroused?

"I can only think of one reason," Shively said. "They don't know what we have in mind, only rumors that we've been constantly working to make it the perfect environmentally sensitive mine. I think they're trying to stop it before it starts because we might actually do it and do it right."

Imagine the consequences.

Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

]]>13210Thu, 21 Jul 2011 07:12:29 +00008 Great Myths of Recyclinghttp://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/13094-8-great-myths-of-recycling/Potentially, an interesting article (I only just started looking at it).

]]>13094Sat, 28 May 2011 11:57:14 +0000Ken Burns: government land is "America's best idea"http://forums.4aynrandfans.com/index.php?/topic/9760-ken-burns-government-land-is-americas-best-idea/A very revealing outburst from viros who want eminent domain used to take property property has surfaced on the website of the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.

An upcoming Ken Burns "documentary" on National Parks planned for release next Sept. is promoting the National Park System controlling land as "America's Best Idea". It employs the usual quasi-poetic, emotional imagery of scenery and populism to manipulate viewers while omitting how the government has taken the land and steamrolled private property owners and ruined their lives across the country.

One of the classic cases of this abuse was at the Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio. The land acquisition spanned three presidencies, mostly as one of several such travesties under the presidency of Jimmy Carter and his Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus (also responsible for the big takeover in Alaska). But Cuyahoga became better known than most of them as a result of the 1983 PBS Jessica Savitch Frontlines documentary "For the Good of All", which followed several home and business owners for four years in their unsuccessful fight to save their property from being taken for "the public good".

Cuyahoga has been omitted from the Burns film, perhaps because it is far from the best landscape of the National Parks, or because of the controversy, or both. But a supplementary film is being produced to promote Cuyahoga which will accompany the Burns film on PBS. When I responded to an article promoting the film in a comment, park boosters became churlish and swinish. The article was based on a PR campaign by the producers and it had extolled the park as a "nature church" and omitted, as usual, all mention of how they got the land from the former private property owners and residents and what the government did to them. The subsequent comments reveal the nature and mentality of the viros in a way they are usually too politically savy to expose in public.

You will learn a lot from this. Read the article and the exchanges in the comments at the newspaper website here.